Vision + Strategy + Growth + Leadership for success = Business Success
Tag: Business Planning
Business planning is an essential role for leaders to turn their vision into reality. Providing a solid basis for decisions, a clear written plan which pulls everyone together into a coherent plan which delivers the leadership’s vision and ensures buy-in from all stakeholders.
The owner of a Garden Rooms business in Scotland approached me to help turn his business around. Operating in a potentially growing market designing home garden rooms, such as offices, bedrooms and gyms while also still building home extensions. He was struggling to run these businesses, spending most time running around firefighting and dealing with unhappy customers.
Situation
The owner was trying to run too much at the same time, which put him under: –
Financial pressures: no real financial model and limited systems in place. With little cost management or operating and margins in place, putting continual pressure of the business’s finances and margin impacts.
Operational issues: with no operating systems in place each project ran differently, which lead to a wide range of quality and complaint issues, including legal disputes.
Quality issues: with staff firefighting onsite with suppliers to get components to site on time, impacting upon delivery times, production and cost and quality impacts.
People issues: of unhappy and unmotivated staff, no one really knowing what they were being asked to do and good staff leaving.
Ultimately there was little customer focus and significant firefighting, unfinished jobs with a long list of snagging issues to be resolved.
Our solution
Working with the key people we developed a clear business strategy and culture shift for the business, identifying the businesses core value proposition and a customer focused ethos.
This led to a complete process of change and focused team actions to re-invent the business around its core value proposition and improvement plans to redesign out all root cause issues within the business.
Following this process we then developed a customer process map. This identified every customer value added step and supported the customer through the entire process. With a new marketing strategy also in place we were able to improve: –
Customer engagement and acquisition which led to an improved Average Order Value (AOV) of 55% in one year.
Ownership of issues by frontline staff to get it right for the customer, reducing snagging and issues to a controlled minimum, with everyone pulling together.
The development of product improvement and a full product range to support customer retention and conversion, making the business the dominant player within the target market.
This enabled
We worked with the owner developing his business and his skills to lead his business more successfully, providing support and guidance throughout. This was supported by clear business planning with the owner with a full strategic and operational business plan in place.
Clear success goals shared with the team.
A forward annual business plan covering every aspect of the business.
Sales goal setting which supported and underpinned the financial plan.
A comprehensive financial and cashflow model to ensure the business is cash positive and profitable for the first time.
The owner was able to positively look at a trade exit strategy from this business.
Being focused and clear on where you are going is vital as a director. Clarity of direction with a clear focus with your business puts leaders in control of their business. Being in control ultimately ensures leaders are successful. But taking control is one of the biggest issues leaders face. Knowing where to start, and even how to start making positive changes to your business can be a real challenge.
Leaders Mentoring Needs
Successful directors must be able to create and make change happen. Making change is essential to make their company able to meet demands and expectations of its customers. So leaders must become change makers within their organisation to make it and keep it successful. Knowing how and when to make what changes is the many skills which leaders need to develop. Being able to see the need, communicate it and deliver change is a major skillset senior people need to develop. Leaders have to be able to move outside their existing comfort zone in taking people through change..
Successful change makes a real bottom-line difference to your business success. But to go through change is often painful and difficult. This is where an experienced mentor makes a real difference.
A good mentor is someone who has not only been through change several times, but someone who also has seen it across multiple markets and with different types of people. A good mentor gets to know you as a person and gets to understand the real challenges the mentees are facing. That’s why leaders find mentors who support them achieve their goals. Richard Gourlay has been mentoring leaders for over thirty years.
The difference between Telling Mentoring and Coaching
Mentoring is the process which supports leaders develop their skills by working with them in developing the mentees skills. Mentoring is a specific set of development skills where a mentor shares their knowledge, skills and/or experience, to help another to develop and grow.
To see how mentoring sits between telling and coaching, see the graphic below. Mentoring is more effective than telling as it enables leaders to develop their skills through their real-life experiences. By talking through situations leaders learn and develop their skills, rather than being told what to do. Coaching on the other hand walks people through situations and provides guidance on specific issues. The greta advantage of mentoring is therefore that the mentee learns how to deal with business challenges rather than being coached through situations. About Richard Gourlay Mentor
Over the last 30 years I’ve worked with hundreds of business owners. Working with micro-businesses through to international PLC’s and I’ve identified that there are some key common factors that successful leaders do which ensure their success, while other business owners struggle to keep their heads above water. What I’ve learnt is that there are simple and logical steps that successful people undertake. These steps which make that something different in what they do delivers real results in taking the guess work out of their business success. This is the basis of effective mentoring.
I’ve spent years refining those key steps into a programmes of business mentoring for senior people. My mentoring programmes support personal growth. Mentoring creates bite-size action planning that develop people in their role. My director mentoring programmes enable people to develop their personal and professional skills. We develop key outcomes into sessions which develop a clear programme of development. Each programme starts by identifying mentees core strengths and areas to work on. This is then developed into a bespoke plan of what they need to do differently to be even more successful in their role.
My Director mentoring programme
Taking the guesswork out our business success requires people making simple steps over time. Mentoring support is usually a monthly process of development. Each step is small and measured, typically spread over a monthly. People are held to account to make the change they want to see. By making each step happen leaders grow themselves and their team as their confidence and competence grows. Our bespoke programmes enable business owners to work ON their business effectively rather than just spending more time IN their business.
Below are some of the key things to consider in taking the guess work out of your business success:-
1. Mentoring: Know What to Work ON
Knowing what you need to focus on makes a huge difference in where to invest your energy and resources. I’m a huge fan of the leadership culture of working ON it not IN it. If you are not working ON your business then how is it going to improve? It is the leader who must make the business stronger.
How will you, or your business be ready and able to face tomorrow’s challenges without making change happen? But you need to know what is important to work on within your business, and why! That’s where mentoring supports you grown and develop as a leader.
2. Directors: Why you are working ON your business
The only certainty in business is Change. Today that has never been truer. The pace of change in every market has, is, and will change at an ever faster rate. Changing market conditions, to customer demands, through to employee expectations have all created additional extra pressures on leaders to respond quicker. Accelerated changes within the business environment require leaders to adapt quicker and more effectively.
How should you respond to those changes? Fast enough and effectively enough to take full advantage of those changes, without loosing site of where you are going and why. If making change is a challenge or if you have ever wondered how to make positive changes, then my mentoring programme will enable you to understand why and how to make change happen. Working on your business is the most valuable actively any leader can undertake and puts you in the driving seat of your business.
3. Director Mentoring: Where to Grow
Every business owner wants to grow turnover, profitability or customer base, but how is the important question. Where is tomorrow’s growth coming from and how can you access it effectively and efficiently? This step-by-step mentoring programme will show you where growth is going to come from and how you can effectively access it.
What is good profitable growth rather than just growth. An important distinction which leaders need to recognise that all growth is not good.
4. How to Make Change Happen
Doing what we’ve always done is the natural default behaviour that people fall back into despite best intentions. Change does not happen unless you make change happen. Mentoring, working with an external advisor is an effective way to develop yourself offline from your existing line management structure. Being able to discuss personal skills development with an external mentor allows people a “safe space” to bounce ideas around, share frustrations and concerns enables people to think through making change happen.
Change is always easy to talk about, but harder to actually deliver. Change is always necessary to achieve success. This step-by-step mentoring programme enables you to create the right changes, which deliver the right results for success. Every step involves a single simple activity which is supported by a template in a workbook to create your success.
5. Director mentoring Reduce the Risks
Taking your business from where it is today to where you want it to be tomorrow is essential to keep your business competitive and successful. But change involves taking risk, but there is an even bigger risk in not making change. Director mentoring programmes reduce these risks by evaluating and balancing the risk factors effectively. Each step is focused around making sensible pro-active decisions which have been tried and tested.
Being mentored by an experienced independent director allows you to talk through ideas and thoughts with a neutral advisor . An experienced mentor provides a sounding board for director decision making and will challenge your assumptions prior to you making a decision. This reduces risk and allows a director to talk through scenarios and likely consequences. This puts risk reduction and mitigation in place to manage and overcome those risks. Being mentored therefore provides confidence and certainty in decision-making.
Taking the risk out of your business success is all about taking small, simple but highly effective steps. Steps, sometimes small, but always forward move the business in the direction you want it to go. I have designed personalised mentoring programmes to fit every type of person and business by size and sector and at every stage of its development.
Short bite size learning, on face to face or remote sessions support leaders lead successfully. I design a mentoring format with clear models (including templates) suitable to each leaders specific needs. I then bespoke design it to enable you to achieve your success. Supporting your personalised mentoring programme are emails to help support you undertake each step and keep you on track.
So if you want to take the guesswork out of your business success? Then this effective mentoring programme is specifically designed for business owners from start-ups to established businesses owners to take the guess work out of your business success. Our mentoring programmes are a combination of online and face-2-face, depending upon your needs and location.
So get started today, make the first step and contact Richard Gourlay today to start your mentoring journey, just fill in the form below.
Despite what marketing people passionately believe most people don’t think about brands, they just get on with their lives. The coffee they buy, the supermarket they go to and petrol station they visit happen almost by accident. In Britain today we are too busy to think through these everyday inconsequential purchases, focused on saving time, not forgetting something or rushing from place to place on a tight deadline. So do brands matter as much as they used to and if so why and how? Brands matter where consumers can value them. In today’s wealthy world every product or service perceives itself as a brand, even if it is just a label. So what makes a great brand?
Consumer Choice
Let’s start with the basics, the consumer has choices. Endless choices if they choose to use them. But in many everyday cases as in my examples above, the consumer sacrifices those choices for simple expedience. The inability to see (or value) brand differentiation, between Starbucks and Costa, between Tesco and Morrisons between BP and Shell, and yet they each fight for space in consumers minds through tiny differences which if we stop and think about do actually exist and we the consumer do actively value.
So much more than First Impressions
So in today’s Britain, what is important about a brand? Is it the halo effect, the first impression, like the smile on the front of a car or is it something more, something deeper and more tangible? Ask the owners of Sunny D (the 90’s orange juice lookalike) and you will find that the halo effect does not last if your brand is not true to itself and to its consumers. Customers have to believe in a brand, it must tell the truth, be transparent and honest if it is to be successful. Gerald Ratner (former MD of Ratners the jewellers who said about his products “because it’s total crap”) also found out that in today’s world everyone must truly believe in the brand, not just the marketing department but the whole company has to believe it and most importantly practice the brands beliefs.
Being clear and precise is also important in the company’s messages for a brand to succeed, a strong undiluted brand message must enthuse internally but must also consistently connect with customers through touch points, look at Innocent, Dorset Cereals or Apple as classic examples of touch point. They also demonstrate a clear story delivered with passion about who they are what they do and why they matter. This focused and consistent message is not just a marketing message but an ingrained set of values which consumers buy into with passion. These brands not only position themselves as premium players in their fields and earn more but they also continuously find new ways to spread their key messages to customers, they have a clear brand strategy to achieve it.
Everyone Lives the Brand
Another vital aspect of any brand success is that the people within that brand demonstrate what they preach, they live that lifestyle, support that brand and contribute to its success. It is their lifestyle, it is a part of the way they and their brand do business.
Great brands go beyond the brand to understand its real value to existing customers but also to tomorrow’s customers. Whether it is a family run local shop or a global supermarket chain great brands position themselves so they develop and hold a market position to develop long-term success.
Great brands create, sustain and evangelise a culture which supports and drives their brand. Creating a culture which underpins an organisations vision and purpose is a key prerequisite for ensuring sustainability of a great brand. Sustainability of a vision can only be achieved if the organisation is supported by an underlying culture which fits with the brands ethos.
Great brands can only transpose from the innovative visionary founder if they create a supportive culture to sustain the brand. An effective and appropriate culture is one which supports the brand and ensures it is can sustain its market position over time. Great brands sustain themselves through a great culture.
The culture of a brand, otherwise seen as the handwriting of the organisation, enables sustainability of the brand over time. Culture today matters from how people work together through to acquisition of appropriate talent. The right people are drawn to a brand they aspire to be part. Business partners focus on brands with likeminded cultures andante to be part of a great brand. In the exact same way customers aspire to be associated with a great brand.
Great brands drive markets. By challenging them through innovation and changing perceptions. Labels on the other hand feed off brands by picking of successful innovations for downstream ‘me too’ market following customers. Great brands invest high proportions of their resources in driving markets forward, through innovative products and services. Great brands are seen to out invest other players more double the the market average.
Creating innovative pipeline cultures thinking long-term make positions rather than short-term tactical single product successes. Labels focus on creating market winning season products, they act as followers often being low-cost alternatives to the brand leaders in any sector. Brands focus on the longterm innovation which shift the paradigm of relationship with the customer through the brand.
Great Brands Add Value
Great brands also develop their own uniqueness, not just the product or service but the whole package is how we do it around here. There needs to be not only consistency but the brand hand writing and value on how they do it. The best brands always develop singular simple signals for customers, cutting through jargon to create clarity without patronisation.
For brands to succeed in today’s global markets these golden rules have never been more important as consumers have never had so much information, but if you follow these simple rules of brand success you can develop and maintain a great brand.
If you want to develop your company’s brand and are looking for some advice on developing your company, its marketing, its sustainable competitive advantage then contact us at Cowden to see how we can assist you, or read more about us in this blog or at Cowden
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Cowden Consulting is a strategic planning and implementation business which works in partnership with customers to grow and develop their business, contact us to learn more.
Apple’s founder and talisman, Steve Jobs has finally had to step down from running the world’s most successful company. It is probably overdue that the world recognises this brilliant strategist who changed the world. Here’s how Steve Jobs changed the world.
Had Steve Jobs just set-up Apple he would have gone down in history as a great inventor. But to have done it twice over with the same company, while in the process creating the world’s biggest company, surely makes him the greatest ever. Possibly his most important contribution was that he created markets and then the best products possible for those new markets. Steve Jobs understood that the technology needed to work for customers, rather than expect people to work the technology.
A Brilliant Visionary
As a brilliant businessman and strategist, he more importantly created world class products and ran the company that delivered those products to market. Most superb inventors just invent, and most great directors’ focus on leading. To do both simultaneously to such a high standard is an outstanding achievement.
Steve Jobs is so unusual because he understands that great technology does not sell itself. That to have great technology you have to be passionate not only about what you produce, but also about the world in which your products exist.
Steve Jobs a brief history
1976 started Apple with Stephen Wozniak to make and sell printed circuit boards
1978 launched a new disc drive which made the money to invest in whole computers
Launched the revolutionary Macintosh computer in 1984
Ousted from Apple in 1985 and returned after creating NeXT in 1996 which Apple bought
Created Pixar with $5 billion in box-office sales, sold for $7.4 to Disney in 1996
Created the i-generation with more to come such as iCloud and entering the TV market
While to many who did not understand his holistic strategy, they looked for and saw flaws. They tried to stab the ego and even removed him from his own company (to play safe with what he had produced as a single new product). He played the long game recognising that the world would not be changed overnight. This was his strategic master-stoke. He got the timing right by understanding the big picture and knowing when to strike.
A Difficult Man To Work With
He has been described by those who have worked with him as wilful, irascible, temperamental and stubborn, to name a few. But can anyone do so much without at least those characteristics to change the world? Other words, which people often use to describe him, include perfectionist, insistent and mesmerising. These words are the ones which the world will remember for. These drove him and describe how he has achieved such global success.
As a manager he had difficult dealings with many people at all levels, from investors and employees. Management and human relationships was not Steve Jobs’ forte. These difficulties made him human. They were simple human failings which showed he was not perfect, but not issues which limited his vision or aspirations.
Steve Jobs Stanford Address
In his Stanford addresss (click here to see it here) in 2005 he explained what made him, drove him and continued to motivate him to become the person he was. This address is one of the few times he spoke of the huge success for which the world will remember him for.
Steve Jobs changed the world.
He saw a world revolution in technology before anyone else, and saw how he could drive that change. Great strategic thinking not only thinking about change, but also the impact of that change will have. That’s what makes him simply the best. Other owners and directors were working on improving their share price, or becoming number one with their new product. Focusing on the today, this month’s or this years priorities, not on changing the world. Steve Jobs looked beyond the single product to look at the whole picture of what a new world might look like.
Steve Jobs drove Apple to rethink the world and in doing so became its biggest player. His line in recruiting John Sculley from Pepsi “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world”. This sums up his strategic brilliance.
Steve Jobs Visionary
Evidence of this brilliant approach comes throughout his career. From using Vangelis’ Chariots of Fire music to launch the Macintosh, through to his unforgettable iPod launch where with a huge back screen shot he casually produced it from the back pocket of his jeans! Steve Jobs has learnt how to successfully engage with audiences. Every product is meticulously planned with product lined up to two years in advance, with innovative marketing from start to finish.
Moving From Technology to Retail
From a business which started out a just selling technology, it is now seen as having the best retail environment. That retail environment created places people actually want to visit. Apple shops where the focus is on excellence, not on pedalling technology cheaper than the next retailer.
Steve Jobs has always had an eye for detail. His artistic flare turned geeky boxes into works of art. Steve want on a calligraphy course which led him to have a non standard font, Apple Garamond created rather than traditional New Roman Times font. Something he goaded Microsoft about at a high school speech some years later. That attention to detail is what demonstrated his perfectionist approach and left the competitors looking and feeling like they were in the dark ages.
Think Different Campaign
Apple’s “Think different” strategy has worked so well since 1997 because it touched people who felt there was no alternative to Bill Gates’ Microsoft monopoly of software. Think Different also drove change for both the 50,000 Apple employees and allowing his strategy to infect and spread globally. It was not only technical people who bought into Macs but a whole new generation of users, who found that there was a credible alternative that did more than just be a glorified typewriter.
While Apple was never one man. Steve Jobs legacy will be difficult to estimate for many years to come as the world’s most successful businessman. The old adage, it is not what one has done that counts but what one leaves to grow, that is the measure of a man’s success. It will take time for the world to see his true legacy, but the following puts some numbers behind this success.
Since Steve Jobs comeback in 1997 Apple has sold:-
26 million iPhones
60 million computers
200 million iPods
1 billion iTunes songs
Apple is currently valued at $356 billion ($2 Billion ahead of Exxon). Making it the largest company in the world. Last quarter alone Apple profits more than doubled to $7.3 billion. Sales rose by 82% to $28.6 billion by selling 20 million iPhones, 9 million iPads, 8 million iPods and 4 million Mac computers.
Steve Jobs announcement of his retirement wiped $17 billion *(5%) from its market share. But over his leadership he has increased its share value by 9000% since 1997.
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